Robert Ambrogi Blog
Catching up on some recent legal technology news and announcements of interest:
Tis the season to support free law. For websites that provide free and open access to law, there are still bills to pay. Two of the best of these sites are currently conducting fundraising campaigns. If you value free access to legal materials, put your money where your mouth is by donating to the Free Law Project and to the Legal Information Institute.
NetDocuments enables ‘geo-aware’ storage. Do you know where in the world your documents are? As law firms move more of their documents to the cloud, it becomes important for them to control where they are physically stored. Last week, document-management provider NetDocuments introduced ndFlexStore, technology that allows firms to physically store their documents and emails in the cloud, in Microsoft Azure datacenters, in local on-premises stores, or in any combination of the above while still making full use of NetDocuments’ global cloud platform.
“NetDocuments’ ndFlexStore supports any combination of global, regional, and private storage under a ‘single library’ concept,” says the announcement. “This permits any user, anywhere worldwide to search, navigate, and access any document globally and transparently, subject only to the security and ethical wall rights regardless of the data storage location.”
LGBT Bar partners with Legal.io. Legal.io, a platform for managing lawyer referrals, has announced that it is partnering with the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York to serve as the platform for its newly launched lawyer referral network and pro bono panels. The platform will enable the bar to more quickly evaluate incoming requests for legal help and make appropriate referrals.
Foxwordy partners with National Bar Association. The professional networking and collaboration site Foxwordy has announced a partnership with the National Bar Association to provide all its members premium access to the Foxwordy platform at no cost. The NBA is the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges. “This effort was something I personally put a lot into and I’m very excited that we can help to further the National Bar’s mission of diversity and advancement in the law,” Foxwordy founder Monica Zent tells me.
I’ve been cited in a law review. I received this email (addressed “Dear Professor”): “The Michigan State Law Review would like to inform you that one of your works has been cited in Brian Sheppard, Incomplete Innovation and the Premature Disruption of Legal Services, 2015 Mich. St. L. Rev. 1797 (2015), recently published by our journal.” The citation was to this article I wrote for the ABA Journal: Washington State Moves Around UPL, Using Legal Technicians to Help Close the Justice Gap.
Bloomsbury goes online. It is rare these days for a publisher not to have an online platform, but until November, such was the case for Bloomsbury Professional, the UK-based B2B division of Bloomsbury Publishing. But now the division has launched its first online platform. “Being a little late to the online party, we have focused on two key but simple features: speed and search,” Managing Director Greg Kilminster tells me. “Our content is of the very highest quality, being directly commissioned from leading practitioners, and we have launched with coverage in 21 different practice areas.” I plan to explore the new site in more depth and report back here when I do.
ALM launches Morning Minute. ALM has launched “Morning Minute,” an early-morning digital newsletter that provides a summary of important news from across ALM’s publications and websites. Designed to be a quick read, the newsletter presents stories in three categories: “What You Need to Know,” covering breaking news and important stories of the day; “While You Were Sleeping,” providing updates about overnight developments; and “What You Said,” featuring insights and opinions from various legal professionals. Read the announcement or sign up to receive it.
Archive video of key transactions. An Austin, Texas, company, Eagle Eye, has released the Eagle Eye Contract Vault, a cloud-based system for recording and archiving video of important business transactions. It provides secure, long-term storage of videos with descriptions and metadata for easy search and retrieval. The company suggests that the service could be used by corporations for compliance and legal protection and by lawyers for evidence. Pricing starts at $99 a month.